Fondation FondaMental

Fondation FondaMentalwascreated in 2007 by the French Ministry of Research. The founding members are: Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, Centre Energie Atomique and the following french universities: Paris-Est-Créteil, Pierre et Marie Curie and Paris-Descartes.

Its goals are to stimulate the scientific research and to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment of major psychiatric disorders such as autism spectrum disorders, resistant depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders

The foundation gathers a nation-wide network of more than 70 research laboratories and 40 university hospitals.

Objectives:

- to improve prevention of severe psychiatric disorders as well as thorough and standardized diagnosis -- to enhance research in psychiatry

- to raise public awareness of psychiatric disorders

- to reduce stigma and discrimination.

Fondation FondaMental which conceived the model of Expert Centers, today coordinates a national network of 42 Expert Centers. Those centers admit patients for in-depth diagnosis before reorienting them to a psychiatrist.

Major research projects are conducted through Psy-COH, the most important psychiatric French cohort dedicated to the follow-up of patients suffering from two major psychiatric disorders: schizophrenia or bipolar disorders. During 6 years (2012-2019) patients are recruited within the national networks of Experts Centers coordinated by Fondation FondaMental. Patients are systematically and thoroughly assessed for psychiatric and somatic symptoms as well as for cognitive functions in order to establish personalized therapeutic recommendations shared with the patient, his family and doctors.

In addition, all their data (6000 variables per patients) are collected and recorded in a central database hosted and managed by Fondation FondaMental, and linked to a biobank.

These data are shared with academic partners for research purposes. The goal of Psy-COH is thus to establish national repository open for shared analysis.

These five years follow up should allow the description of patient trajectories as well as markers of stages of the disorders.

In addition, in order to diminish stigma associated with psychiatric disorders, Fondation FondaMental along with patient associations, has developed an efficient communication strategy towards general population and policy-makers.

FondaMental 10 years vision:

Progress in healthcare in psychiatry will come from the reorganization of traditional symptom-based categories leading to multimodal personalized-treatment signatures based on clinical assessment, digital phenotyping, blood and brain-based biological markers and, environmental assessments. Precision psychiatry is also expected to improve understanding of pathophysiological mechanisms and to facilitate discovery of new therapeutic targets with the potential to affect all dimensions of mental health care.

By taking into account multi-modal sets of variables, we want to identify the right treatment for the right patient; by exploring innovative care pathways, we will improve the quality of life of patients and diminish health costs; by organizing public-private partnerships within an entrepreneurial mindset, we will foster innovation; by developing high-level training courses, we will fuel these innovations in educating patients, clinicians, and researchers.

« Our goals are ambitious but needed: we want to carry out a real research revolution in psychiatry to better understand, better diagnose, better support and most of all better treat our patients »